Monthly Archives: August 2012

The PVNET iPad 101 for Windows Users class starts on September 13th. As I was reviewing the material I will cover during the course, it dawned on me that significant amount of the material is also applicable to the iPhone.

So if you want to learn how to use your iPhone beyond just making and answering phone calls, you may want to take this class.

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The fall term is starting in a few short weeks. For those of you who live in the South Bay beach cities of Los Angeles or in Torrance, you probably got your catalogs in the mail. If did not receive a catalog, and want to check out the classes I’ll be teaching this fall, you can click here http://dons-digital-photo-corner.com/digital-photo-classes/
to see the classes I will be teaching at each school.

If you have taken one of my classes in the past, you know that I provide online handouts on a password-protected webpage.

I have posted a video on YouTube that demonstrates how to access the handouts, once you are provided the password.

I hope to see you in one of my classes, so this video is useful.

Thanks for watching.

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Those of you that have been in my classes know I generally take a backpacking trip to the sierras about this time each year. Sunday morning I leave for this year’s trip. Not quite so rugged this year – not that it ever was, really. We’ll be doing a series of day hikes, but the nights will be spent in my friend’s cabin at Mammoth. Rather than being out under the stars at night sitting around the camp fire, the four of us will be hunched over our laptops, cell phones, or iPads.

We normally have lunch on the Friday before leaving to hash out the last minute details. This year we tried something new. We used the Hangout capability of Google+. We sent about 10 minutes talking about our trip and an hour wrestling with the technology. Of the five of us who connected, one could not get his microphone to work, so he wrote messages and held them up to the screen. Another person was late arriving and had a hard time figuring out how to join a Hangout already in session. Another friend’s audio was awful, but it appeared he had too many duplicate windows open.

But we accomplished our goal, which was more about using Hangouts than trip planning.

With any luck, I may be able to post from the Sierras. I’m not taking my laptop, so we’ll see what I can do with my iPad.

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As I have written before, I take just about every photo using the Camera RAW setting. I’ve been doing this for some time and have gotten used to the very large files and extra steps it takes to process them, in contrast to taking JPEGs.

However, the added flexibility and quality of the final result is worth it. Recently, I’ve added an extra step to my workflow. When using the Adobe Camera RAW editor, you can chose to process the image using either 8 Bits/Channel or 16 Bits/Channel. Generally, I have been using 8-Bits/Channel, especially if I was working on an image that I was going to finish up in PSE 10’s Editor, rather than Photoshop CS6. Elements can open a 16-bit image, but can’t do many things with it. For example, Layers are not supported.

So here is how to do it. While you are still in the ACR, you select 16 Bits/Channel as shown in the above figure. The adjustments you make are then done before the file is opened in the Editor. Once the file is opened in the Editor, you convert it back to 8 bits/channel via Image > Mode > 8 Bits/Channel.

Doing this conversion, allows you to take advantage of the higher bit setting to do the math in ACR, but ends up with a file that PSE can work with. In theory this should lead to less color banding, for example in skies, and in general allow you to adjust the sliders more aggressively in the ACR without the picture breaking down. This is especially important if you are using the ACR to simulate a high dynamic range (HDR) image.

Give it a try and let me know if you do/don’t see any differences in the quality of your edited camera RAW images by leaving a comment below.

Also, if you found this post helpful, please give it a high rating. Thanks for reading.